Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi just arrived and is now working (we can’t watch TV, but until The Good Wife at 9.00pm I should be OK).

I first of all tried a slightly older image of Debian that I had downloaded on my laptop and it worked, but took a long time to boot up: when it did I didn’t have the password! So I downloaded the latest Debian ‘squeeze’ from raspberrypi.org, used the Win32DiskImager that the site recommends to write the image to the SD card and tried again (the MD5 hash that Win32DiskImager generated was not the one that it should have been by the way).

This time there’s a bit more information about one-time initialisation and some words of wisdom re waiting for portmap to stop. It rebooted, I put in the username and password (pi and raspberry) and got to the command line/shell.

I was expecting it to boot into the GUI, but a bit of looking at the Troubleshooting forum threw up a command I recognised: startx. I typed this in and we were running the GUI.

Scratch was my next stop. This is one of the two educational programming languages installed by default in this image (the other is Python). I much prefer BYOB so I went to the BYOB site for the latest BYOB.image and BYOB.changes files (the .image file is a memory snapshot of all the Squeak objects that together make the Scratch system, and the .changes file allows you to see the programming that went in to developing BYOB). These came down as a .zip file, which you can open using Xarchiver from the Other category on the Start menu.

I first of all tried extracting them directly to /usr/share/scratch but the standard pi login doesn’t have write access to this, so I extracted them to /home/pi/Scratch. I then ran a LXTerminal from the Accessories category on the Start menu, and from that used sudo (superuser do I assume) to run another copy of LXTerminal by typing:

sudo LXTerminal

I then changed directory to /usr/share/scratch with:

cd /usr/share/scratch

I wanted to keep the original Scratch.image and Scratch.ini files intact so I renamed them to ScratchOriginal.image and ScratchOriginal.ini using mv (a bit of a panic until I remembered that you rename files in Unix/Linux by moving them to the same directory with a different name):

mv Scatch.image ScratchOriginal.image

mv Scratch.ini ScratchOriginal.ini

I then moved the BYOB.image and .changes files to /usr/share/scratch with:

mv /home/pi/Scratch/BYOB.* .

then renamed them to Scratch.image and Scratch.changes with:

mv BYOB.image Scratch.image

mv BYOB.changes BYOB.changes

When I then ran Scratch from the Education category on the Start menu I got BYOB. Success!